Modern Wisdom - #1029 - Malcolm Gladwell - How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil

Episode Date: December 6, 2025

Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, podcast host and an author. Do contagious diseases, memetic epidemics, and drug epidemics spread through the same underlying pathways? The answer may explain why society keeps falling into the same contagious patterns, and how we might prevent future memetic epidemics before they happen. Expect to learn what the history of the death penalty is in the United States, what the “Tipping Point” means and what happened when we reached it, how epidemics of ideas differ from epidemics of drugs, what makes someone a “super-spreader” of social change, the “tipping point” dynamic of trans athletes in sports, if we are responsible for the epidemics we start and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a 15% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM15) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talk to me about the history of the death penalty, fettered past that I didn't realize existed. Oh, my goodness. In what country, in America? Yes. Well, this is a subject we dig into in this new series we've done on Revision's History, the Alabama murders. And, you know, the history of the death penalty in the United States is not a, in other countries, the battle is essentially about whether you should have it or not. And in America, the battle is really, we'd like the states to have the right to do it, but they have to do it humanely.

It's this absurd position where an issue is not the morality of the state taking someone's life. The issue is that the state should take someone's life in a manner that seems consistent with the values of America. So there is this, you know, there used to be the case, you know, it was the way back when it was, we hung you publicly. Then we moved on from that, and then was the firing squad, which was considered to be more humane. Then they moved on from the firing squad, and they went to the electric chair. And then from the electric chair, they went to lethal injection. And then from lethal injection, they have now gone on to nitrogen gas, to asphyxiating you in nitrogen gas. I didn't know about the most recent, the iPhone 17 Pro Max that came out for...

This is the latest wrinkle, right. So they've been... And at each stage, the intention was, formally the intention was to make the death more humane and certain... for the person being executed. But in fact, the intention was to make the process of execution more acceptable to the public. So they're looking for the way that the form of executing somebody that is the easiest to watch. So you can imagine how hanging would be quite a spectacle, you know, disturbing, but you wouldn't take your child to a hanging.

execution by firing squad might be a little less dramatic. But certainly the big jump was the electric chair was gruesome. I mean, somebody's brains were literally being fried in front of your eyes, and their eyes are popping out and things. So it really was, that was up until the 1970s. And the move to a lethal injection was the idea was that we can put people down the way we put down horses. And that's really quite common. It appears at least to be kind of calm and humane and it's done by medical people.

And it's all very kind of, so that's the kind of like, it's a very curious, peculiarly American approach to this subject. And what is the, what's the current status of that in the EU? Well, we get into this in the podcast, a very brilliant Canadian, like me, kind of named Joel Zivett. who's an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist with that kind of side interest in the death penalty. People have been using lethal injection for 40 years since the late 70s. It's become the standard for if you wanted to kill somebody in your state government in the U.S. You inject them with three drugs. The first is a sedative.

The second is it calms you down. the second is a paralytic which just kind of like keeps you in one place and the third is potassium chloride which stops your heart and that's the idea was that you got calmed down you were buckled in and and the the paralytic just kept you still and then we stopped your heart with potassium chloride and what Joel Zivitt discovers is that's not how you die during in lethal injection, you die because the first thing you get, which is typically some kind of barbiturate, the sedative, so alters the pH, the acidity of your blood, that essentially your lungs are on fire and burn up, and you can't cry out in pain because you've been given a paralytic. and so you spend a few minutes in exquisite agony

as your... Imagine pouring acid. Imagine forcing someone to drink a cup of acid. That's essentially what we're doing. And then I give you another drug which makes it impossible to be heard as you silently scream. That's lethal injection.

And so ever since he showed the world that, there's been this idea that, oh, maybe we should move to asphyxating people with nitrogen. Sounds humane comparatively. It is, honestly, when I was doing this, our podcast is all about this murder that took place in Alabama, and all of these issues come up in the course of, as the state tries to figure out how to,

what to do with the killers. And it is the most, not only is the details of these things, just so bizarrely macar, but I don't know, how do you pronounce that word? I never know. macab. Macabre.

Do you say macab? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The details are so absurdly that way. But then what's additional is that there is simply no interest in any of these details on the part of, we're talking about a case that happened in Alabama.

The state government of Alabama is just completely indifferent to all these. They don't even like, they don't even seem to care what happens to somebody that they're executing. They're just kind of,

and that was the, of one of the many revelations in doing this little mini-series we did called the Alabama murders was the kind of, it's almost as if for the state of Alabama and other states, the cruelty is the point, that telling them that what they thought was humane, it actually isn't, doesn't diminish their motivation and enthusiasm. It seems to increase it. We're going to have this come up with the young person that shot Charlie Kirk. It sounds like, I think, the day that the head chief of police did a press conference, one of the first things that he said was we will be seeking the death penalty. Yes, Utah is a state. Now, Utah has used where Charlie Kirk was killed, has in some cases gone back to the firing squad. Oh, wow.

Okay. We could pull that out. We could pull that out again. Now, I don't know. Brilliant. Yeah, a little. Play the old stuff. play the old songs again it is it is very like you know the band of the 70s playing its hits

now i don't know in some states they it's considered this again very american you get to choose your method i don't know whether that's the case in utah what would you choose firing squad i'd go firing squad too it's pretty heroic way to there's um the the one that i would would really want is guillotine. Oh, that's epic. Yeah. Yeah. And then have your head placed somewhere magnificent for the rest of time?

Well, you know, the thing about guillotine was, you know, guillotine at the time was considered this great progressive innovation. It wasn't, it was intended to be a vast improvement over like tying people to the wheels of wagons and running them over. it was like look we're a civilized society we should be able to kill people quickly and cleanly so the guy the guy who gave the guillotine his name whatever his name was Mr. Guillotine that was his whole thing is that you know we're we're civilized country this is we're Frenchmen of the 18th century

you know we can't be playing these games um so like I would there's some of the top Zed off with a big Blade. Yeah, there's something to be said for... I mean, the very fact we're having this conversation is absurd, right? Like, why are states killing people? Like, it just seems like this just the idea that we're entertaining this conversation in 2025 is slightly incredible. It's a sign of just how strange America.

I mean, you're new to America. Does this not strike you as just being bizarre? Not particularly. I think that the desire for retribution has existed throughout every sort of humans thought processes, whether they're modern or from five decades ago or forever ago. You know, capital punishment. Is that sort of the title for this kind of a thing? Right, yeah. Mutiny, you know, pirates on pirate ships, stuff like that.

there is this sense of, there is a particular line that if you cross it, the threshold is you pay the ultimate price, which is that you no longer get to live. I understand, my point is, I understand the psychological compulsion from humans. It doesn't surprise me. Do we think, would I have thought that in the modern world, we would have transcended that in the same way as we transcended shitting in the street and open warfare that you just do on your neighbor because you don't like him or something yeah in in some ways but i think the the compulsion the desire to do it makes makes makes total sense to me and you get this lock in from the past uh there is i would imagine an argument a sort of a twofold argument uh one being uh this person did something

so heinous that they do not deserve to live anymore uh and secondly uh this is a deterrent to other people who would consider doing this in future. One, oddly enough, one is, the second one is very sort of utilitarian. And the first one is actually kind of like calmic and astral. And I think, I don't know, what do you, what do you make of that post-mortem on the sort of modern world of it? Well, I'm, I guess I'm more, I'm more puzzled by, you're speaking in terms of, this being an understandable human response to an act of brutality. But I'm more puzzled by the fact that if it is an understandable human response,

why is it confined in the developed world to the United States? Why is it not understandable in England, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, you know, on and on and on. Greece, Italy, they don't have an understandable human response. The only Canada, Bermuda, Jamaica. How long ago did France must have used things? the guillotine relatively recently. Until, I think, the 80s.

So it's been a good, uh, it's been a good 40 years. Yeah. They were one of the last holdouts. But I mean, look, when, when you have come up with the entire genre yourself, uh, you've got to,

you got to keep playing the old songs. You know, you've got to keep using the gear in until the 80s. It is, it goes to this thing that I'm sort of obsessed with, which is that I do not believe that either Americans or non-Americans, fully appreciate just how weird America is. I think that Americans think, oh, the rest of the world is kind of like us, only just a little less so. And non-Americans, if they don't know America well, just assume, oh, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like England, but it's bigger.

Actually, it's not like England. It's better. Like, Canadians are, I'm a Canadian. Actually, I'm an Englishman, but I'm an adoptive Canadian. Canadians may, we make this mistake all the time because we really, you know, we watch the same sports. We watch a lot of the same television. it looks, if you drive from Detroit across the border, or Buffalo

across the border to Toronto, it all looks the same. If you didn't know there was a border there, you would think you would still, and yet, the differences between Canada and the United States are just phenomenal. Like, so it's that, that's something that's always puzzled me, that, um, that this country that I'm, I am, you know,

I'm an immigrant to is just, I don't understand why it's so singular. Yeah. It is 50 countries combined together under a single government, single currency, single language. I think you get some weird externalities when you just combined that many people with. Yeah. What's the line from the Paul Simon song, a loose accumulation of millionaires and billionaires? I wasn't familiar with it.

Something like, that's from Days of Miracle and Wonder. Yeah, yeah, it's not. I mean, where you are living in Texas is not the same country as where I live in New York State. No, that's correct. Speaking of trajectories over time, do you think that the tipping point aged with difficulty, like lots changed in the information landscape from then until now? I'm particularly interested in sort of what you didn't or couldn't foresee what happened that you couldn't have predicted in that way, which obviously led to the revenge of.

I mean, we're talking about two books written 25 years apart. My first book, The Tipping Point, my last book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. When I wrote the first book, the internet is really just in its infancy. And all of social media doesn't exist. And the Cold War has just ended and we're absurdly optimistic about it. the future of the world and I'm 30 some odd years old

and you know my life is ahead of me and then 25 years later when I write the sequel I don't know whether the dynamics that I'm describing in the original tipping point are that you know the simple idea

the spread of ideas can usefully be understood as similar to the spread of disease, that the same contagious principles that govern epidemics of disease, governed epidemics of ideas. That idea was a novel idea in the year 2000.

Today, it's a commonplace idea. So in that sense, it's not that the ideas of the book became dated, it's that they became commonplace, right? Now, everything's viral now. We talk about that. And whenever we use that, when we say something on, you know, Twitter has become viral,

we are using the language of epidemics of disease. We have adopted that metaphor as our own. So the task, so when I was sat down to write this kind of sequel to my first book, it wasn't that I was saying, okay, I got it wrong and this is what I missed. I mean, there's a little bit of that in the book. It was more like, okay, the task is different now. We've all accepted this metaphor. Let's dig a little deeper and try and understand what it means.

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Modern Wisdom 10 at checkout. That's jim.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout. Do you feel like a Cassandra in that context, being able to virality and contagion? Well, not really. I mean, I feel there's something kind of very, very, very much. self-regarding about calling oneself a Cassand. I love, I love the question. I love the question because everyone's desire, this compulsion, the temptation to see yourself as the prescient, clairvoyant that could have.

I would have said it before. I think it speaks to you that you're like, you know, like I just kind of said it. Because I got the, listen, academics were talking about. I got this idea from sociologists were using this metaphor in this way. It wasn't like I somehow saw it. I just kind of stumbled on this idea and said,

I love this idea. I think it's cool. Who popularizes it, not who came up with it. So, okay, I'm interested in how your view of influencers evolved since the tipping point. Obviously, you're saying dynamics that you noticed back then are now very commonplace in terms of how people describe stuff now. So that's something that's the same. What's changed? What's differed?

What's evolved? So one of the ideas that I spent a lot of time with in the original tipping point and in the end in the sequel is just the observation. that social influence is asymmetrical. And this is true of epidemics of disease, many kinds of epidemics of disease, which is that if you look at COVID, every person infected with COVID does not carry an equal risk of infecting someone else.

The job of infecting is done by about 5% of the population. That 5% might be 100, or even a thousandfold more likely to pass their infection to someone else than the rest of us. That's an asymmetry. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's a massive asymmetry. That is very similar to the way idea spread.

If a hundred of us think that Taylor Swift is a great singer, we are not equally responsible for spreading that news to the rest of the listening, music-loving public. There's going to be four or five of us who do all the work, right? who have by virtue of their social position or their or the kind of trust that people have in them or how socially connected they are, they can tell the world that this unknown artist's name, Taylor Swift, is great. But if somebody is, if my mom listens to Taylor Swift in her nursing home, she's not, that, and loves her,

it's not a consequential fact in the history of the trajectory of Taylor Swift, right? With all due respect to my mom, she's not like, does not have her finger on the pulse of popular culture? But you can all, you can imagine that there are people who are, you know, massively social connected and have bona fides. There are people who, when we want to know what to listen to, we listen to them. And if that person likes Taylor Swift, it really matters. That process, asymmetry, which I was really fascinated with in the original tipping point. And I was, it's the great commonality between diseases and spreads of ideas. I think it's, that's gotten more marked in the, I think everything's asymmetrical now.

I, you know, if you'd ask me 25 years ago, I would say that select kinds of contagious ideas have this pattern that, but many other, many other things are kind of like spread randomly or spread equally through the population. I don't, I think everything's asymmetrical now. I think that, I don't think you can find a phenomenon that isn't marked by the fact that five percent of the infected population is doing 90% of the work. Why? Because I think, I mean, here's an analogy, which is before there's air travel, international air travel. So we're in the 19th century. And if you had a contagious disease, it would spread to another country only if somebody got on a on a passenger ship

crossed the ocean and were still infectious at the time they got off the ship, right? So things did move around the world, but they moved relatively slowly around the world. That's where quarantine came from, right? Quarantia. Yeah, exactly, that you could,

and it was possible to kind of nip these things in the bud. Now, then there's the age of jet travel, and all of a sudden, I could be in, I could catch a cold in New York and be in and spread it to my dinner partner in London that night, right? So what's happened is that a technological intervention has sped up and enhanced the asymmetrical process. So the small group of people who travel a lot become hugely important in spreading disease, right? Because they have access now to way more, you know, if you, so, you know, I travel a lot.

Like, I would be one of those, I probably travel more than 99% of the human population. If I have, if I'm deep, if I'm very infectious with the cold and I get on a six-hour flight to Los Angeles, I am like, I'm patient zero. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm doing the work of about 100 people. So that, when you think about the digital age, it's doing that for ideas. There's just so many more contacts between people now and access to ideas. the and the kind of the social power, the

connective power of certain kinds of individuals is just so enhanced by virtue. The interconnectedness allows the super spreaders to be just way more effective and powerful. And not only that, there's an additional

thing which I should get into in my book when I talk about the opioid crisis, but technology also allows people who want to spread things to better identify who the super spreader is. That's crucial, right? As opposed to being, you know, 25 years ago, you say, I think that most ideas are spread by a very small group of influential people. I have a vague idea of who they are, but I'm no one for sure. Now, I feel like we sort of, we don't know for sure, but our certainty about who the super spreader is is much greater. And that means that the super spreader's power is enhanced

even further, right? That's an interesting, the transparency or obviousness and awareness of everybody of the influence of the person and of the, you know, the common knowledge idea? It's kind of like the emperor's new clothes, it's not enough to know the emperor has no clothes on. You need to know that everybody else knows as well. And if that person is the most influential, but do everybody else know that they're the most influential? Well, if you have this big number next to their Instagram account or their YouTube subscribers or, you know, their newsletter lists or whatever, oh, other people, here's an objective statement of how many other people think this person is a person of note. And yeah, it's this odd people accumulate reach, the opportunity to be connected

to more people. That reach gives them a degree of authority, independent of their authority, right? They may have some authority already, some sort of trust, prestige, dominance type thing. And then everybody's awareness of the fact that other people are aware of their authority He, like, supercharges this even more. So, yeah, I can see how these things sort of square and a cube and, yeah. The original observation, though, is this idea of the transparency of asymmetry. So not only, so we know things are asymmetrical, but now we know where the asymmetry lies has affected nearly every field that you can imagine.

Let me give you two random examples. The big one is in fighting crime because of our ability now to, precisely track and model outbreaks of criminal behavior. We now know, you go to a criminologist and they look at a map of Austin, Texas, or London, England, or New York City. They can tell you exactly the 15 or 20 city blocks

where 50% of the crime in those cities takes place on a regular basis. They can tell you down to the stretch of sidewalk, where a criminal act is most likely to occur and we can put police there and we can effectively shut down that criminal act. That is, crime is a highly contagious asymmetrical activity where a small group of people commit a huge majority of the crimes

and they commit those crimes in predictable places at predictable times according to predictable patterns. And if you know all those things, You can completely tell you your policing, your law enforcement. I was talking to a guy yesterday who is working in, he runs the anti-mosquito spraying program in a county in Florida. And they used to spray huge amounts of pesticide over the entire county with planes. Now they use drones and LIDAR.

And now what you do is you figure, out exactly where the swarms of mosquitoes are and you only, you send the drone to that exact spot and you just display the spot, right? It's like, it's like hilarious. It's like the Ukraine war going on with pesticides and mosquitoes in a random part of Florida. But that's the same thing. Mosquitoes are massively asymmetrical. It's like all of the damage is being done by a group in a very specific spot. And now that we know where the spot is, you can fight the epidemic at its source. You don't have to spray everything. That's a great metaphor for how the world has changed in the last 25 years. Yeah, that's a new way to talk about super spreader, right? Super efficient

spreader, perhaps. You mentioned oxycontin there, opioids. Why is the Oxycontin Sackler family such a good through line case study literally morally pharmaceutically what is it that they all bring together in one example well you have to understand

that the oxycontin the most infamous drug of the last hundred years the drug that kicked off this opioid crisis in the United States that at its peak was claiming whatever 120,000 lives a year I mean unbelievable carnage

there's nothing particularly special about OxyContin. It's just a, it's a reworking of a drug, of drugs that have been around for years and years and years. They made it a little more powerful and they made it slow release, but it's not, it wasn't that it was some dramatic breakthrough. So in other words, OxyContin is not the product of some kind of innovative genius. What it is is the product of, of a marketing innovation, that what they realized in, what Purdue,

the maker of OxyContin realized in the 1990s and early aughts as this epidemic had started, is that if you look at how an addictive painkiller is prescribed by doctors across the United States, there is a massive asymmetry. Most doctors don't prescribe it at all because they are doctors. They are aware of how dangerous opioids are, and they dramatically limit their patients' access to them. a very, very, very small group of doctors in a very, very specific parts of the country don't give a shit.

And what Purdue was able to do using the kinds of databases that we have now, that we didn't have 20 years ago, that track the prescribing habits of every doctor in America is precisely identify and target the tiny fraction of doctors

who didn't give a shit. That's how how we got the opioid crisis. It is exactly what we're talking about. It's finding the swarm of mosquitoes. It's looking at the block in New York City where all the crime is. They found those doctors and they said, we're going to ignore every.

We're talking about 2,000 doctors. Out of the hundreds of thousands of doctors who could potentially have prescribed Oxycontin, they find that group of 2,000 and they put all of their resources in trying to convince those 2,000, people to prescribe as much oxycontin as is humanly possible. That is the entire, that's all you need to know about the opiate crisis, right? It's just a ruthless application of this kind of asymmetry

that we've been talking about. Everyone else up to that point was under the illusion that if I want to sell lots of a given drug, I got to reach everybody, right? I need as many, I need as many customers as possible, doctor customers as possible. And produce like, no, you don't. Well, you're nuts. You need to focus on 2% of the population in order to make this thing take off. And that's how we get

220,000 deaths a year. Is there a way that an epidemic of drugs differs from an epidemic of ideas or even, I guess, an epidemic of viruses? Do ideas spread in the same way? Or is there something else going on?

well you know i mean i'm hesitant one should always be hesitant about making sweeping statements especially when the word epidemic is being used yes i think that the i would say that the commonalities are greater than than we then we imagine um obviously you don't you don't die in the same numbers from a noxious idea that you do from a from a dangerously addictive um opioid but um so there's that And ideas, there are some weird differences, which is, when I was doing my book and I was talking to all these people who started the opioid crisis, the thing that they couldn't understand was why it lasted so long. It should have, normally when you look at an epidemic

of disease or that's killing lots of people is they burn out really quickly, the crack epidemic in the 90s. It doesn't actually last that long. The HIV, well, we really get a, really get a really powerful medical intervention early on, but HIV doesn't, in the Western world, does not hang around for decades. It gets tamed pretty quickly. The flu comes every fall, and it's gone by the spring, right? You know what? Large numbers of people want coming out with opioids linger. That was what was so weird. It goes on for 25 years. It's still going on. It's finally starting to fall, but it's at a high level. Because it moves from opioids to heroin and then heroin to prescription drugs to heroin

and then heroin to fentanyl and then fentanyl to mixtures of ulcery and just keeps going and all these people who study this for a living they're observing this and are keep waiting for it to burn out right? Like there's a well-known generational mechanism where

if your dad or mom is addicted this happened with crack the kids of people whose parents were addicted to crack did not touch crack you saw what happened and you were like I want no part of it right um it's interesting with the genetic predisposition that would be carried through as well so what you have to assume there is the environmental like inverse role model effect is so powerful that it's got escape velocity to get over you having the raw building block genetics of an addict

Yeah. Yeah, that's impressive. Really. I mean, you see a lesser version of this with, I mean, alcoholism clearly runs in families, but I think that might be because to use the same kind of model that you're talking about, that there, people can be functioning alcoholics for their entire lives. And so the kind of lesson that the child is receiving is a little bit more mixed. With crack, you literally saw your parents. disintegrate in front of your eyes. It's a really, really powerful concentrated lesson that this is something you stay away from. If the natural path of alcoholism was that one of your parents starts drinking when you're 12 and they're dead by 16, then I would imagine that the alcoholism would not run in families in the same way. Yeah, that's fascinating. Are you still using that old face shaver from three Christmases ago to shave your nether region? If so, that

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It's a hint that they might be a bit too hairy, and it's a lovely gift. Plus, you can get 15% off and free shipping by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 15 at checkout. That's manscape.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 15 at checkout. There's this idea called the Region Beta paradox, things that are not bad enough to be bad but not good enough to be good, living in a house that's in an all right location. and the rent's not too expensive but there's mold in your landlord's a dick

or being in a relationship with somebody and they're not abusive but you're really not that in love and maybe they're cheating on you actually and you're not too sure. All of these people would be worse if their situations all these people would be better off if their situations were worse. Oh, that's fascinating. It would kick them out at the bottom.

And I talked about this a few years ago and as the internet does, clipped it and did a thing and somebody asked me at this live show I did in Australia last year said up and he says you know you have done live events and sometimes questions are a little more verbose they're a little bit rambling and this one was real sharp and short and he says I think I'm in region beta should I purposefully make my life worse so I get out of it I was like

kind of a radical solution it's a high risk strategy but it might I don't know it might work and we came up with a slightly different solution but I thought that was really funny it's like well the version of that is the difference between the cold war and, you know, Russia and Ukraine. We never, the Cold War never comes to a hot war because the consequences of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States are existential.

Russia and Ukraine are just like slowly over time or randomly destroying each other. And, you know, they can, both of them are carrying on, right? So it's like, they're in, what's the phrase, region beater? Region beta, you guys would call it. region, region, region, beta paradox.

They're in, that conflict is in region beta, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is. I suppose one solution here would be if you're an alcoholic, you could start trying crack. That might be a way. Yeah, another radical one. Another thing I'm interested in, this parental contagion idea, I've been having a lot of conversations recently about, embryo selection, IVF embryo selection, polygenic risk scores and stuff like that, and the potential sort of tiger mom implications pre-birth that could roll back. So I'm interested in this parental

contagion idea that you talked about. Well, I'm a little bit of a skeptic on that kind of polygenic screening, because the things that you're interested in are the ones that are impossible to screen for, right? So intelligence, if it's definable at all, is probably the result of an unknowable interaction between so many thousands of genes that God knows how you select for it. And then the other thing is like, if you don't have a handle on the ways in which a genetic susceptibility interacts with the environment, then you could select for something and it could all come to naught, right? Like, when I think about what intelligence is or what the kind of determinants of success are,

there's so much, A, randomness, and B, so much of the, so much of it is about motivation. and motivation is the least genetically determined of all the character traits. Conscientiousness is the, what's the big five? Conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience. Agreeableness and extroversion. Agreeableness and extroversion. Conscientiousness is the least genetically determined of all those extroversions the most, yeah. And that's because conscientiousness is powerfully, environmentally determined.

If you like your job and you like your boss and you like your co-workers, you work hard. If you hate them all, you won't. Whereas, you know, if an extrovert in a roomful of sour people is still an extrovert, they're still yucking it up. Like, they're not relatively impervious to that. And I've come to the opinion that when it comes to explaining performance, conscientiousness and motivation are way, way, way, way, way, way more important than we realize. And if that's the thing that's the least genetically determined, then what are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, I suppose the argument would be trying to gain 1%, or 0.1%, wherever we can,

the same as playing classic music to your unborn baby while it's in the womb, because it's going to help the brain complexity of the brain development or, you know, people are, the same reason that I use a temperature controlled mattress duvet that tracks my HRV and I try to not eat three hours before I get, you know what I mean? Like people are trying to. Are you on the HIV train? I am on the HRV train. Look at me. You think I'm not on the HRV train. Yes, whoop brothers. Woop brothers indeed. Wooop, baby. Yeah. Woop. We could do a whole sad thing on whoop. I'm a whoop obsessive. It's chief function. for me is, sorry, this is a digression. The sleep score, really what it is I think I had a shitty night. And then whoop tells me I didn't.

This happened last night. My daughter wakes me up at 4 o'clock in the morning. Daddy, daddy, I want to, blah, and I can't get back to sleep. And I wake up dreading my whoop score. Whoop said they had a great night of sleep. And I've been fine ever since. But what about the gaslighting in the other direction? That's what you need.

What happens when you think you had a great night's sleep? You wake up and... Almost never happens. It's only, for me, it only ever works. If I think I had a great night, I had a great night. Maybe Will, I could get the CEO. Did he skew my numbers? Maybe he gave me.

I could ask him, I could ask him whether or not he could give me, like, optimistic whoop. I just want to be, I'm happy to be gaslit. I only want to be gaslit in one direction now. I always want to assume that I've got mostly. What's your, what's your, what's your HIV average? Probably in the 50s, high 50s. It's not that great.

Good for you. No, that's high. I mean, I'm lower, but I'm a good deal old. drops with age. These are such as myself. Parenthoodle contagion. Parenthoodle contagion. So there's, I mean, I guess the, the, I'm so impressed by this unknown interaction between

environment and genes that I'm hesitant to kind of go too far on. There was a great book written that I wrote about it at the time. 30 years ago was written by called Do Parents Matter by Judith Harris and she basically summed up all of the evidence

about what impact parental child raising has on the kid and the answer is the evidence says not a lot basically if your kid you're feeding your kid

and they have a roof over their heads and you're not terrifying them every night it doesn't matter what you do and book of course is enormously controversial Now that I'm a parent, I totally agree with it. But, like, I just think it's such a, the whole relationship between parents and the outcomes of the children is so muddy and murky and that I don't even know what to make. I don't know what to make of it in any context now. I don't, like, in fact, I have a game that I play with people, which is when I say, you know, people all love to just play the game of, well, in this way, I'm just like my mom or in this way, I'm just like my dad.

And I say, no, no, no, no, no. Skip a generation. The only way to do that usefully is to, is to think about your four grandparents. Because there's too much noise with your parents. Who knows, you grew up with your mom and your dad. Like, who knows, like, who knows if you're even active. Shed environment, N of two. Yeah, but who knows it? And you have such a tangled psychological relationship. Who knows if you're even accurately representing the way they are the way you are, right? I could go on for half an hour about my father and where my father alive and listening to it,

I'm quite sure there's a possibility he would listen to that and say, I am nothing like that. Right? And that's just the reality of your parental relationship. Your version of your parent and your parents' version of themselves are going to be different.

So how do we even start figuring out how your parent influences you? At least with your grandparents as a degree of remove. So I can say My dad would tell the story about my mom's father, who was this kind of quiet, thoughtful, bookish guy. But he was, people would always ask him to give speeches at weddings.

And my father once went to an event where my grandfather was speaking, saw him and said, oh, no, he went to an event where I was speaking, saw me and said, I saw you, and I saw. I thought it was daddy. They all called him daddy. I thought it was daddy. Now, so there's an example of, like, it was clear.

The relationship between me and my grandfather is clear. But, like, you would never have walked into my father and said, oh, I see, that's Malcolm. You know, like, it's too much noise. One of my friends, his answer to the question, if you could go for dinner with four people living or dead, who would it be? His answer to that is always his four great-grandfathers, says you would learn far more from sitting down. down with your own genetics than you would for sitting down with some genius. A hundred percent agree. How cool would that be?

How cool would that be? Although I, and I didn't know my grandparents very well, so I would settle for my four grandparents. But, yeah, the four. I didn't know mine either. Can I give you, I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to give it to you. It's my show.

I can do what I want. But it's called the parental attribution error. We love blaming our parents. It's practically a right of passage in modern psychology, but there's a double standard buried in the trend. We attribute what's broken in us to our upbringing. while claiming what's strong in us is ours alone. Call it the parental attribution error,

like the fundamental attribution error, where we blame others' actions on their character, but excuse our own by pointing to circumstance. This is a skewed way of assigning credit and blame. We externalize the bad, internalize the good. We're quick to blame and slow to credit. You say that you're anxiously attached because no one held you when you needed it,

but isn't your ability to be alone with your emotions and to endure discomfort quietly, also forged in the same crucible. You blame your parents for pushing you too hard in school, convinced that it made you perfectionistic and neurotic, but when was the last time you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition, discipline, and drive? You point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated as the reason that you fear failure, but what about your meticulousness and your standards and your refusal to phone it in? Basically, as far as I can see, people are more than happy to lay the blame for their shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but very rarely lay the credit for their victories there too. And I just, I thought that was an interesting asymmetry. Yeah. That's like, that is, it's funny that you, that is a, a beautiful allegory to the fundamental attribution error that there are. We make, I have my own version of that, which is what I call the asymmetrical parental attribution error. Okay. I love asymmetries. And that is that we indulge in

that, but typically when we indulge in that, we only ever make reference to one. one of our parents at a time. So you don't say, I got this bad from my mom and this bad from you're my father. What you do is you're in a moment in a stage where you say, well, you're just blaming dad.

And then years pass, and you flip, and you just blame mom for a while. And then you flip. It's at only one time, you could only hold one disparaging. Oh, right. Okay.

That's brilliant. It's like, I remember Scott Alexander had this idea. He called it thinking in super positions, right, that you could have two worlds exist in your mind at the same time. But when you're talking about the parents, it's like you have to collapse the superposition down. Like the uncertainty principle isn't able to exist. Only one parent can exist in your mind at one

time. Yeah, it's never the interaction between the Buckish father and the outgoing mother and I am somewhere in between. It's like when you're not wanting to be outgoing, it's like, well, dad did tell you. And when you can't chill out, it's like, well, mom did say. It's binary. And there are many interesting things about this, particularly now that I'm a parent, the one is that from a very early age, and this is an obvious dumb observation, but it's nonetheless one that I've just been thinking about,

there is a, hypothetically you might think, that the child, particularly the young child, thinks of their parents as a unit. My parents don't want me to do this. My parents, but in fact, they never do. From the very beginning, they're distinguishing between the father and the mother or whatever. They're, and we continue to do this later. You know, I think this becomes even more kind of pronounced as we get older.

And it's a, it is, in the beginning, it's understandable because you're correctly as a toddler, understanding your parents relate to you independently and using different strategies. But you are, to your point, you're completely missing the extent to which it is, the interaction between your parents that also fundamentally shapes you. You're just blind to it. Like, they, the consensus position of Joyce and Graham Gladwell was X.

And X also had an effect on me, right? Not just Joyce and Graham individually. Well, how many people, when they get together, are different people to who they are when they're apart? With some of my friends, there's a version of both of us that comes out. And maybe it's even more us, right?

it feels closer to our sense of self than I am when I'm on my own or with other people that I maybe even know better but there's something or the reverse around some person and around them all I can do is be bitter or resentful or I think small-minded things or I see the world in scarcity mindset or whatever

given the fact you talk a lot in stories which I think is why it's very easy to read your writing when it comes to the medium of communicating infectious ideas, obnoxious or benevolent, I guess, talk to me about the landscape of how storytelling infects differently than facts and sort of how that plays together.

Because I think in the modern world, people assume that you should be convinced by the facts, follow the fact, follow the science. But I'm not convinced that that's the way that the human brain works, especially when you're trying to change opinions, fuel empathy, even fuel hate as well. Yeah. Well, the story does a lot better job of eliciting emotion.

And that's enormously important, obviously, in anchoring an idea and making and giving an idea leverage over somebody's thinking or feeling. The story embedded, this is a kind of more subtle point, but, you know, a story to my mind is a narrative that defies or a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. That's what a story is. The reason I will Why do I watch

HBO's task I finished it on Sunday I watched it every week for seven weeks Why did I keep watching? Well, it was interesting I needed one of a TV show to watch But fundamentally I didn't know how it was going to end Right

So I knew if you had asked me Before the final episode How do I think it's going to end I would have given you Six possibilities it turns out almost all of them were wrong. So the story, what made it satisfying to watch that through the end

was that it did not conform to my expectation. And I knew that, and that's why I was drawn to it, right? I knew that it was pointless to try and figure out how it was going to end. And all stories, good stories, good songs, good, all have that quality of betraying our expectation, and we know that going in and that's why we want it. There's something fundamentally human about wanting our expectations to be betrayed. That's why we laugh at jokes, right?

That's why we, there's so many things we do. Think about it. Why would somebody pay an enormous sum of money to sit in an arena and have just somebody, one person up on stage, just tell these abbreviated anecdotes about their life or the world? The answer is because it's just a constant rush of betrayed expectations, right? like there's a I always watch these little Instagram snippets of

Nate Brigasi and is that am I pronouncing his name right I've only ever seen it written down yeah so who I think is very very very very funny in a kind of but his betrayals are so

beautifully done and so subtle and so because he's working with this incredibly narrow template he's telling these super kind of prosaic and benign stories about family life. And so your expectation is

nothing can be funny or happen here, right? He's taken so many things off the table. There's going to be no dangerous, edgy commentary. There's no politics. There's no sex. There's no violence. There's no swearing.

There's no nothing. He's not going to rag on anybody. He's not going to make fun. of anybody. So you're like, so we've narrowed it. And that's why he's so inviting. You're like, okay, this dude is trying to thread the needle here. He's going to do something. He's going to betray me after taking 90% of the possible objects of betrayal off the table. Right. And then he pulls it off and you're like, oh my God. And so you laugh way out of proportion to the quality of the joke. I mean, the joke is, the joke itself is pretty mild, but the degree of difficulty

is so great, that's what you're rewarding. You're like, you did it, man. Like, did not see that coming. And you decided you want to paint in one color, right? That's like, and that's, that is the, so all of which is a long way of saying that a story is one of the few places where we are willing to change our mind, right?

When we're talking about a betrayed expectation, we're talking about you change your mind. And facts don't, People have no difficulty whatsoever dismissing facts, but the kind of subtle mind change and it comes with a story is much harder to dismiss. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Jimsharks, Skims, Allo, and Newtonic, which is why I partnered with them, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class.

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below are heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase that's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Dude that's so great. That's such a interesting insight. I had this conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is a upcoming agnostic commentator I guess used to we would have called him an atheist a few years ago but I don't think that's that's kind of the in term anymore. And he's very pro religion. He's He's fascinating. He goes into every conversation with a theologist or a believer desperately hoping to believe on the other side. He just has a very high bar for it and is educated in the counterarguments. And he said this real interesting thing that what we

are asking people to do in the modern world is to ignore the types of information and persuasion which is most easily understood and believed in, story, myth, archetype, narrative, personification, to dispense with that in place of stats, figures, numbers, charts, data, sterile, scientific, rational, materialistic. And he goes, is it any surprise that you can't sort of rip people across? You can't bludgeon them over the head with just more bar charts in the hopes that we, and then shame them for not believing, right? The thing which is most believable to you

is the thing which you're not supposed to believe and the thing which is least understandable and the least salient to you is the thing that you're now supposed to put all of your faith in. And again, asymmetries. It's asymmetry between the power of story and the power of statistics. Shapiro's got that famous facts,

don't care about your feelings. Like, it could not be more backward. It's like feelings really. do not care about your facts at all, especially if that feeling has come from a fable, right, or a story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although he's using it into slightly, that's actually super interesting, I thought about it,

but he is using that in a slightly different context, which is that what he's saying is, that you are really upset right now over something is not, does not mean that the underlying thing is somehow, has been kind of existentially disabled your displeasure does not meet does not disqualify

you haven't changed anything like it's still you know so yeah but I I happen to think he's one of the better he's I don't he's not in my particular corner ideologically but I wish they were

I wish most commentators were as rigorous in their thinking as he was. I saw you made headlines last month about trans athletes. I imagine that was thrilling for you. Do you see a tipping point dynamic going on there? I think it's already tipped. I mean, this is one of the most puzzling.

Let me just say parenthetically that that was one of the strangest public controversies I've ever been a part of. I was describing, I was the moderator on a panel. on, I was describing my experience as a moderator. A moderator battle between a pro-trans participation and an anti-trans partition person and I'm trying to elicit a fair argument four years past and I'm on a podcast out of Johannesburg

with one of the participants and I just think, I said there was a moment in that discussion where I failed as a moderator. I didn't do a good job. There was a moment where I should have moderated. Moderating is difficult. ever moderated in your life particularly on that topic

so that's all I said and then like the whole thing went and I was like I didn't I didn't recognize any of usually when you're involved in a controversy you recognize the controversy I did not recognize the controversy I was like what are they talking about

you wouldn't have predicted this in advance no I was like what are they talking about it was a moderator no one ever mentioned the word moderator like I sort of changes when you know that I was the moderator right anyway has it's already

tipped. This is, but, wait, this is one of the most ridiculous subjects in a following sense that most people, myself included, would give their 100% approval, support for the trans agenda. The idea that we would be discriminating against a class of people over this particular characteristic is absurd and offensive, right? But I think that this last random thing that's thrown into the agenda that says, oh, and by the way, someone who is biologically male should be able to compete against

biological females is deeply puzzling to a lot of people. Right? They're like, what does that have to do with, it's weird? Like, what's it doing there? I don't think, and I think most people are in wholeheartedly in support of the agenda. and just say that last item, which by the way, it only involves like a dozen people in the entire the United States. Like, it's so hypothetical. It's like, most people would you say, why are you adding

that? You're just, you're just antagonizing. You're giving fuel to the right. By the way, during the election, what is the part of the trans agenda that the Republicans hammered again and again and again? Participation in sports. That's what it came down to. So you're giving your enemy a weapon to use against you over what a dozen a hypothetical case involving a small number of people like so that's why i find the whole thing puzzling i don't just don't i don't understand why are we even talking about this it doesn't can you name can you name a signal trans athlete trans woman competitive elite athlete who is currently being disadvantaged by this policy can you give me the name. A trans woman athlete who's being disadvantaged. Yeah, we're locked out of competition with

biological women as a result of the policies in elite sports. I would imagine that Leah Thomas would be at some point. I feel like the swimming association was one of the first bodies to have implemented this. I have to imagine if they are going to continue to swim. Right now they can't swim? So would that be a yes? So you have... I've got one. You got one. I got one. Yes. Can you give me another? No. Okay. I did my one. So why are we having... Why are we having... So you, you are a highly informed participant in public controversies, and I have touched on this issue, which everyone assumes is this hot button. This is tearing our country apart. So I have gone to a highly educated source and I've said, give me names, and you've come up with one who's not even irrelevant,

who isn't even swimming anymore, right? This is a definition of an absurdity. Why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical? Why don't we discuss the actual issues that are of existential meaning and threat to the trans community? That's my point. Interesting. I think on the other side, the right would say something like, this is the tip of the spear, This is sort of endemic of the encroachment into locker rooms and bathrooms.

This is, you know, the college sport thing is like it's only half a wall away from it being about school as well. And it, you know, it all kind of, especially with the interesting one about the locker rooms thing. I've thought this for ages. I think that the locker rooms thing and the sports thing are so tightly bound because in order to get onto the sports field, you have to go through the locker room. and there is this sort of just geographic map psychologically inside of people's heads where they play that role through and you think well if the locker rooms that that has to be happening in sport too I wasn't aware of how few incidents this is this is causing but certainly a lot

of headlines are happening but even the locker room thing is a separate issue so there is a separate social issue of how do you accommodate somebody who belongs to a relatively new social category. And we have a long history in America of struggling with that issue, right? It was the issue we struggled with African Americans in the 50s and 60s in Jim Crow. Do we let them into our, you know, in Birmingham in the 1960s, black people are not allowed to use the same changing rooms as white people in department stores, right? Same issue, right? Eventually, we figured out how to do that. And I think we can figure out how to do that with the trans community. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a completely separate thing, which is in elite sports,

should the incredibly small number of people who are trans women who can meaningfully compete at the elite level be allowed to compete in the female category? That's the narrow thing that was being discussed on the panel of which I was a moderator. So anyway, It's an example of the internet occasionally is very dumb. What was the story about the Harvard women's rugby team? Oh, there. I was interested in, well, I was interested in this, there's a certain amount of Ivy League bashing that I've done over the course of my career, that now that Ivy League bashing has become an agenda item in Washington,

and I'm a little more circumspect about my Ivy League passion, but I was just intrigued in my book about the fact that this university in the United States that plays more of varsity sports than any other is Harvard. People think, oh, it must be some sports factory

in the South or something. No, no, no. Ivy League schools have the most athletes, have a greatest share of athletes on recruited athletes on campus of any institution. My question is, well, why? That seems weird to me. Why would an elite academic institution go out of its way to have lots of athletes on campus and also give those athletes a tremendous break at admissions? So huge controversy in America about, oh, don't you dare give an admissions break to black people? That's wrong. That's a violation of a Supreme Court says outlaws it, blah, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, the example, the example. exact same institutions are giving an equal and in some cases larger break to people who are really

good at rowing or fencing. It strikes me as weird. Does that not strike you as weird? It's very strange. And why is one controversial and the other one is not? I would guess that in a meritocratic system, people believe that something which is done based on merit is maybe more deserving somehow more justified in some sort of a way. But what relationship is there between the merit here and the role of an academic institution? It's like saying if you, did you put on your app, if you were a high school kid applying to Harvard,

is it useful to put on your application that you're a really good cook? The answer is. Well, if cooking was something which was part of the competitive landscape for a varsity league college, perhaps that would be the case. I think when people look at sports,

but I mean, college sports is an entire category. Yeah, but these sports are absurd. Like, it's fencing. No one's, the role. I say that to a fencer with this big long. Wait is that. You'll come after me. I mean, I make the point about,

I talk a lot about tennis, which I think is the most ludicrous example. Massive admissions breaks at elite schools for people who are tennis players. What is the definition of someone who's good enough to play Division I tennis in America that they spend their entire lives on tennis court? Why do you want at your school

someone who's not even participating in the undergraduate experience, they're just practicing their backhand. What is so special about that solitary, utterly boring activity that merits them getting an admissions break that is equal or greater to the break that you give to somebody who is part of a historically disadvantaged minority? I was going to say, is there something more special about somebody who's black than somebody who can play tennis while? someone who is, someone who is a product of several centuries of racism in the United States absolutely has a moral claim on an admissions break that is an order of magnitude greater than someone who has spent their entire adolescence at a tennis academy in Florida hitting forehands.

What if they also play tennis? Black tennis players are the rarest of them all, you know? Yeah, there's not a lot of them. That's, you know, well, tennis, being good at tennis is a linear function of how much money your parents have. So you would expect that the wealthiest, uh, ethnicities in the United States would have the most tennis players. Interesting question on that. Um, Seth Stevens Davidowitz wrote a great book about, uh, was it who owns the NBA, who wins the NBA, something like that. And, uh, he did data scientists used AI to help him write this book in 30 days.

It's brilliant. And, uh, the most common name of, of NBA players the top five it's like Michael John they're very middle class names the reason is that even in the sport of basketball

one that people assume is going to sweep up these poor kids from the streets and deposit them into the NBA now LeBron born to a 16 year old single mother is a remarkable

for how much. The exception the proofs the rule. Yeah, how much of an outlier he is. Because, I mean, if you are LeBron, you can beat the system, but not anyone else. I wonder how many LeBron's have been born after LeBron now. That's my question. Whether or not we're going to see a ton of LeBron's in the NBA

in a couple of decades' time. Yeah, that makes perfect sense, because the degree of preparation necessary now to make the NBA is just way higher than the minute you radically increase the amount of preparation necessary to excel in a given area. You skew it by income, like classic income. Yeah, a pretty classic example, which is one of the reasons why I'm a big track and field fan.

One of the beautiful things about track and field is it is one of the last sports for which this is not true. You do not need to have wealthy parents to be a great runner. Or you like watching poor people do sports. That's what you're telling me. I like to watch the, I like to watch the pores. They run faster. No, I like a sport where there is no distinction where income and class don't buy you a head start. That's what I like.

I like a sport where name me another sport where the Kenyon who grew up, you know, way off in the Rift Valley somewhere, it can meaningfully compete against someone who has the full power of Nike behind them and grew up in an upper middle class suburb of Dallas. There's no other, give me another sport where that happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not even, not even, cycling. Football, like, football in Europe, if you don't come out of one of those football systems, you're not playing. I think it's any problem that you have with team sports, as soon as you get into team sports, right, it's got to be an individual sport for this. I can't think of a team sport that would allow you rowing is not going to be. But even, even a massive number of individual sports have become class-weighted, like tennis.

Perfect example. golf massively classwork yeah golf's a particularly interesting one uh tennis kind of kind of makes sense at least to some degree in that you need to be playing against people like it is interesting with track and field that apart from like wrestling which i don't think happens on the track or the field it's just in the olympics there's no track of field that is against an opponent in quite that Like, there isn't an opposition in the same way. There's just competitors, right? Also doing the same thing to you independently of it.

Like, the two javelin guys are, like, throwing the javelin at each other as it's coming. And that means that if you grow up in an area that has more better javelin players that can spend more time throwing the javelin at you, that you become more successful. Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't considered that. The egalitarian nature of the Olympics. And also, the weird, running's really interesting. Distance running in particular is fascinating because...

You know, it starts out since you're English. The English dominate middle distance running for the longest time. And if it wasn't English, it was the English by proxy, the Australians and New Zealanders. Then the Africans in the kind of 80s take over. And all of a sudden, everyone starts saying, well, that's because they have a genetic advantage. That's because they're listing all these reasons. And then what happens in the last 10 years? All the Europeans are, and now it's the English again, right?

It's like, so it's like we realized we made this, we, we, it's this thing that we do, which which always, it strikes me as, is, is kind of fascinating, which is that we toggle back and forth between our causal explanations for a phenomenon, just depending on where we're situated. If we're winning, oh, it's like, we have the culture of, blah, when we start losing it's, oh, it's got to be genes. Cultural attribution error. Yeah. And then we start winning again and like, now if you talk to the English, it's like,

You talked to some English track and field coach. They'll tell you, oh, it's the long English longest son's running tuition. It's like, dude, you didn't say that 15 years ago when the Moroccans and the canyons were winning all every race. Like, you just started saying it because Josh Kirstar and won the world championships. And now all of a sudden you've changed your mind. Malcolm Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen. Malcolm, I find you fascinating. I think we could continue to do this for a long time, but I need to get on a flight to go on tour to

your state. So I need to leave. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got that's going on? They should listen. I think the latest podcast I did on my podcast for business history, we have a series called The Alabama Murders. It is the best thing I've ever done. And I would wholeheartedly recommend that to people.

And I have a new book out and paperback, revenge of the tipping point. Sick. Malcolm. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was really fun. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the modern wisdom

reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillex.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.